☛ F.C. Gundlach Foundation: Jean-Luc Godard by Franz Christian Gundlach, taken for the Hamburg magazine Film und Frau (16/1961) while the filmmaker was presenting À bout de souffle Une femme est une femme at the XI Berlinale (Berlin film festival), 1961. See the Photographic Work of F.C. Gundlach. © F.C. Gundlach

Maybe the photo was indeed taken in 1961 (as the original captions state), but À bout de souffle (Breathless) was presented at the 10th Berlinale, in 1960. UPDATE–Dec. 4, 2012. The F.C. Gundlach Foundation confirmed the information by email: the photo was indeed taken for Film und Frau 16/1961 when Godard was attending the XI. Berlinade, But he was there to present ‘Une femme est une femme’, not ‘À bout de souffle’, as captions previously mentioned. I first discovered this portrait while browsing Everyday I Show.

Jean-Luc Godard was born on December 3, 1930. His upcoming film Adieu au Langage (Farewell to Language) was shot in 3D and is supposed to feature a talking dog. Below is an excerpt from a small essay Richard Brody posted online today to commemorate Godard’s birthday. Brody writes for The New Yorker where he is the the movie-listings editor. He’s also the author of Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (2008, Google Books, Amazon).

Godard has been the liberator of weirdness: he was always ahead of the game in terms of movie-madness, recognizing that the habit of thinking in terms of images and sounds didn’t detach him from emotional engagement with his subjects but added a new dimension to it. He understood that the modernism of the cinema was based in the archeology of its history—and that devotion to the history of the cinema was a blend of passive rapture and actively audacious manipulation. One of his great insights—dating from the nineteen-seventies—is that home video would be the basis for a newly analytical understanding of film history, because it would allow for the easy copying of clips and their manipulation via video editing with such techniques as slow motion, freeze-frame, and superimpositions of other images and text); he made the work, “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” that proved the point. Every video essay that turns up online owes him a debt of gratitude. (The New Yorker: “J.-L.G.: Eighty-Two” by Richard Brody, December 3, 2012)

Previously: all posts tagged Godard.

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Franz Christian Gundlach is a photographer gallery owner and curator. Since 2003, he’s the Founding Director of the House of Photography in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg:

In 1953 he began his specialisation in fashion photography journalism-style with his work for the Hamburg magazine Film und Frau. He mainly photographed the fashion of Berlin fashion designers, Parisian Haute Couture and always fur campaigns. A further focus of his work was on fashion reportages with film stars in fashion and artist portraits among whom were Romy Schneider, Hildegard Knef, Dieter Borsche and Jean-Luc Godard. (read more)